Page 124

He read for awhile—he was working his way through John Sandford’s hefty oeuvre—and was eventually roused by a familiar jingling. It was Laurie, by the front door. Her leash was looped over the knob, and she was brushing the steel clip back and forth with her snout. Lloyd looked at his watch and saw it was quarter to twelve. “Okay, right.”

He snapped on her leash, grabbed his left front pocket to make sure he had his wallet, and let Laurie lead him out into the bright light of midday. As they walked down to Six Mile Path, he saw that Don had started to put out his usual collection of horrible plastic holiday decorations: a Nativity scene (sacred), a large plastic Santa (profane), and a collection of lawn gnomes tarted up to look like elves (surreal). Soon Don would risk his life by climbing a ladder and stringing lights that flashed on and off, making the Pitcher bungalow look like the world’s smallest, tackiest riverboat casino. In previous years, Don’s decorations had made Lloyd feel sad, but on this day he laughed. You had to give the son of a bitch credit. He had arthritis, bad eyes, and a bad back, but he wasn’t giving up. For Don it was Christmas or bust.

Evelyn came out on the Pitchers’ back deck. She was wearing a misbuttoned pink wrapper, there was some kind of whitish-yellow cream smeared on her cheeks, and her hair was every whichway. Don had confided to Lloyd that his wife had begun to lose the plot a little bit, and today she certainly looked it.

“Have you seen him?” she called.

Laurie looked up and gave her trademark greeting: Yark, yark.

“Who? Don?”

“No, John Wayne! Of course Don, who else?”

“I haven’t,” Lloyd said.

“Well if you do, tell him to stop farting around and finish the damn decorations. The lights are hanging down, and the Wise Men are still out in the garage! That man is loopy!”

“I’ll pass it along if I see him.”

Evelyn leaned over the rail, alarmingly far. “That’s a good-looking dog you’ve got there! What’s his name again?”

“Laurie,” Lloyd told her, as he had many times before.

“Oh, a bitch, a bitch, a bitch!” Evelyn cried in a kind of Shakespearian fervor, and then uttered a cackle. “I’ll be glad when goddamned Christmas is over, you can tell him that, too!”

She straightened up (a relief; Lloyd did not think he could have caught her if she’d fallen) and went back inside. Laurie got to her feet and trotted down to the boardwalk, turning toward the smells of fried food wafting from the Fish House. Lloyd turned with her, looking forward to a piece of broiled salmon on a bed of rice. The fried stuff had begun to disagree with him.

The canal meandered; Six Mile Path meandered with it, lazily turning this way and that, hugging the overgrown bank. Here and there a board was missing. Laurie paused to watch a pelican dive and come up with a fish wriggling in its satchel beak, then they went on. She stopped at a spray of sawgrass poking up between two boards that had warped apart. Lloyd lifted her over it by the belly—she was getting too big for the football-carry now. A little way further down, just ahead of the next curve, palmetto had grown over the boardwalk, forming a low arch. Laurie was small enough to walk under, but she paused, head forward and cocked to the side. Lloyd caught up with her and bent to see what she was looking at. It was Don Pitcher’s cane. And although it was made of stout mahogany, a crack ran halfway up its length from the rubber tip.

Lloyd picked it up and examined three or four drops of blood dotting the wood. “This isn’t good. I think we better go b—”

But Laurie bolted ahead, jerking the leash out of his hand. She disappeared under the green arch, the handle of the leash clattering and spinning behind her. Then the barking began, not just her usual double yark, but a volley of more urgent sounds. Alarmed, Lloyd ducked through the palmetto, waving the cane this way and that to push bunches of it aside. The branches whipped back, scratching at his cheeks and forehead. On some of them were beads and smears of blood. There was more blood on the boards.

On the other side, Laurie stood with her front legs spread, her back bowed, and her muzzle touching the boards. She was barking at an alligator. It was dark green, a full-grown adult at least ten feet long. It stared at Lloyd’s barking dog with its dull dead eyes. It was splayed atop Don Pitcher’s body, its blunt shovel nose resting on Don’s sunburned neck, its short scaly forepaws possessively cupping Don’s bony shoulders. It was the first alligator Lloyd had seen since a trip to Jungle Gardens in Sarasota with Marian, and that had been years ago. The top of Don’s head was pretty much gone. Lloyd could see splintered bone through what remained of his neighbor’s hair. An ooze of blood, still wet, lay drying on his cheek. There were oatmealy strands in it. Lloyd realized he was looking at some of Don Pitcher’s brain. That Don had been thinking with that very stuff perhaps only minutes ago seemed to render the whole world meaningless.

The handle of Laurie’s leash had dropped over the side of the boardwalk and into the canal. She continued to bark. The alligator regarded her, for the moment not moving. It looked remarkably stupid.

“Laurie! Shut up! Shut the fuck up!”

He thought of Evelyn Pitcher standing on her back deck like an actress on the apron of a stage, crying, Oh, a bitch, a bitch, a bitch!

Laurie stopped barking, but continued to growl deep down in her throat. She seemed to have grown to twice her size, because her cloudy dark gray fur was standing out not just on the scruff of her neck, but all over her body. Lloyd dropped to one knee, never taking his eyes off the gator, and plunged his left hand into the canal, feeling for the leash. He found the cord, yanked the handle up, clutched it, and got back to his feet. He tugged the leash. At first it was like pulling on a post stuck in the ground—Laurie was that braced—but then she turned toward him. When she did, the gator raised its tail and brought it down, a flat thwack that sprayed up droplets of water and made the boardwalk tremble. Laurie cringed and jumped onto Lloyd’s sneakers. He bent and picked her up, never taking his eyes from the gator. Laurie’s body was thrumming, as if an electrical current were passing through it. Her eyes were wide enough to show the whites all around. Lloyd had been too stunned by the sight of the alligator astride his dead neighbor’s body to be afraid, and when feeling did return, it wasn’t fear but a kind of protective rage. He unclipped the leash from Laurie’s collar and dropped it.

“Go home. Do you hear me? Go home. I’ll be right behind you.”

He bent down, still watching the alligator (which never took its eyes from him). He had carried Laurie like a football many times when she was smaller; now he hiked her like one, through his legs and directly into the palmetto arch.

There was no time to see if she was going. The alligator came at him. It moved with amazing speed, kicking Don’s body several feet behind it with its rear legs as it pushed off. Its mouth opened, exposing teeth like a dirty picket fence. On its leathery, pinkish-black tongue, Lloyd could see bits of Don’s shirt.

He struck at it with the cane, bringing it around in a sideways sweep. It whacked the side of the gator’s head below one of those weirdly expressionless eyes, and broke along the crack in the mahogany. The broken piece twirled away and fell into the canal. The gator stopped for a moment, as if surprised, then came on. Lloyd could hear the clitter of its claws. Its mouth yawned, its lower jaw skidding along the boardwalk.

Lloyd thought of nothing. Some deeper part of him took over. He stabbed out with what remained of Don’s cane, plunging the jagged end into the whitish flesh at the side of the alligator’s shovel head. Grasping the cane’s handle with both hands, he leaned forward, putting his weight into it and pushing as hard as he could. The alligator was momentarily driven sideways. Before it could recover, there came a rapid series of cracking sounds, like blanks from a track-starter’s pistol. Part of the old boardwalk slumped, spilling the gator’s top half into the canal. Its tail came down, whacking the twisted boards and making Don’s body jump. The water boiled. Lloyd struggled for balance and stepped back just as the gator’s head surfaced, the jaws snapping. He stabbed at it again, not aiming, but the jagged stub of the cane went into the gator’s eye. It reared backward, and if Lloyd hadn’t let go of the cane’s curved handle, he would have been pulled into the water on top of it.

He turned and bolted through the palmetto with his arms outstretched in front of him, expecting at any moment to be bitten from behind or thrust upward as the gator swam under the boardwalk, planted itself on the mucky bottom, and battered its way after him. He came out on the other side, daubed with Don’s blood and bleeding from his own scratches. Laurie had not gone home. She was standing ten feet down, and when she saw him, she raced toward him, bunched her hindquarters, and leaped. Lloyd caught her (like a football, like a Hail Mary pass) and ran, hardly aware that Laurie was wriggling in his arms, and whining, and covering his face with frantic licks. Although he would remember this later and call them kisses.

Once he was off the boardwalk and on the shell path, he looked back, expecting to see the alligator hustling after them along the boardwalk with its eerie, unexpected speed. He made it halfway up the path to his house before his legs gave out and he sat down. He was crying and shaking all over. He kept looking back, watching for the gator. Laurie kept licking his face, but her trembling had begun to subside. When he felt able to walk again, he carried Laurie the rest of the way to his house. Twice he felt faint and had to stop.

Evelyn came back onto her deck as he trudged toward his back door. “You know if you carry a dog around like that, it will start expecting it all the time. Did you see Don? He needs to finish putting up his Christing decorations.”